Josh First on Harrisburg: State needs to pay city PILT funds

Josh First is a Republican running for state senate District 15 (the seat of retiring Senator Jeff Piccola).

Josh First

If inconsistency is the hobgoblin of good government, then Harrisburg is dressed up for the Halloween Parade. Incinerator corruption aside, one giant, glaring inconsistency is causing Harrisburg’s day-to-day budget challenges: payment-in-lieu-of-tax (PILT).

David Unkovic, the former Harrisburg receiver who recently named names in alleged city corruption, with implications for local political races, also issued a report listing the sale of the Harrisburg incinerator and the leasing of other assets, such as parking garages, as means to achieving city solvency. It’s a solvency on paper, amortized out ahead by a hundred years, give or take.

But it’s a plan, a voice in the wilderness, because if there is one thing gridlocked Harrisburg has lacked, it is a way to move forward. Whether agreed to by leaders or not, a plan provides the biggest of reliefs to those who have underwritten Harrisburg debt or other investment, that relief being knowledge of what to expect going forward. The elementary stability emanating from that knowledge will help Harrisburg’s housing market and other aspects of its presently unstable economy.

However, glaringly absent from both the receiver’s plan and from the voices of most officials is the expectation of a consistent and substantive financial contribution to Harrisburg by the state. One example of such oddly regular but variable payments to Harrisburg are those associated with fire protection, ranging from a low of about $250,000 to a recent high of about $2.5 million.

These unstable variations on a theme are important to the city’s future survival, because the fact is the state owes the city a payment-in-lieu-of-tax. Pennsylvania state government pays PILT on all other state public lands, including state forests, state parks and state game lands. Why the capital city seems exempt from its fair share is unclear.

PILT has never been nor is it now on the radar screen of solutions to the city’s problems. PILT is not in the plan. It should be, and it could be worth millions annually.

Looking at the iconic Capitol Complex, with its golden lady high above, located squarely in the middle of the Keystone State’s capital city, one must ask: Why does every single Pennsylvania state park, state forest and state game land, totaling in aggregate about 4 million acres of state land, pay an annual PILT totaling millions to local government, but the Harrisburg Capitol Complex pays not one red cent of PILT?

When I led ultimately successful efforts to protect tens of thousands of acres of majestic public land here in central Pennsylvania, the one question routinely asked by elected officials before we finalized the acquisition was: How much PILT will these acquisitions mean to local government?

We citizens must now ask the same questions of the next receiver: Will the plan require consistency with state lands existing practice, and, therefore, how much PILT is the state of Pennsylvania going to pay to Harrisburg?